When she had seen him twice only she took it upon herself to snub young Merridew on his behalf.
She and Kitty were leaving the School at four o"clock on the Thursday afternoon when the son of the fancy stationer joined them, and, taking it quite for granted that his tidy bit and his tennis-lawn made him as desirable to Louie as they evidently exalted him in Kitty"s eyes, walked westwards along Holborn with them. He wore a new red waistcoat with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, and perhaps it was in order to live up to his splendour that he made Louie an offer which she curtly declined. They were pa.s.sing a confectioner"s shop; perhaps he noticed--for he seemed a sharp enough little bounder--Louie"s glance at the window; he turned to her.
"Like some chocs?" he said.
Had Louie not already detested him, this would have been quite enough. Priddy would have had less appalling manners. As it happened, she would have liked some chocolates; lately she had craved for chocolates as much as she had hated the smell of tobacco; but she wanted no chocolates of this young man"s buying.
"No, thank you," she replied; and presently she contrived to put Kitty (the straight-backed Kitty whom a man accompanied) between Mr.
Merridew and herself.
She had the outside berth of the pavement, and she was wondering whether she would not cross the road and hop on a bus, leaving Kitty and the heir to the tennis-lawn together, when something Kitty said detained her. It was something about Mr. Jeffries. Hitherto Louie had hardly been listening.
"--oh, Jeff!" Merridew was saying. "He"ll have to go till we come back. Anyway I shall save half-a-cake of soap."
"There"s such a lot _of_ him," Kitty giggled. "How big"s your bath?"
"Well, he"s an awfully useful coach for the Method exam., I will say that for him; so we"ll call it a fair swap. You know Evie"s aunt, don"t you?"
"No."
"Thought you did. Good old Aunt Angela! (She always gets ratty when I call her that.) I didn"t know she was an old friend of the pater"s till we saw "em at the Zoo that Sunday. So that"s why they"re coming."
"Oh, perhaps, perhaps not," said Kitty archly. "Perhaps it isn"t the aunt they want to see----"
A pa.s.ser-by elbowed Louie off the pavement; all she caught of what followed was Kitty"s laugh.
"So that accounts for the new blouse! You never think of asking _me_ down to Guildford, Archie!" she said reproachfully.
"You must get a chaperon," Archie replied gallantly; "can"t be did without, Kitt-oh. The mater don"t allow running after yours truly."
Then of another light pa.s.sage Louie heard only the concluding laugh.
"Well, what of it?" Archie was saying knowingly; and Louie heard something else about ap.r.o.n-strings. "Pale blue baby ribbon ones, eh what?" Archie added, with a grin.
"Archie!" Kitty reproved him.
"Oh, come off it!" replied the fancy stationer"s son. "As if a fellow hadn"t eyes! If you girls _will_ wear pneumonia blouses----"
"Archie, you"re dreadful!" said Kitty, deliciously shocked.
"Well, it"s a tannersworth at the Holborn Public Baths for Jeff next week-end----"
Here Louie interposed. Even amus.e.m.e.nt can be too rich. "Good-bye," she said, "there"s my bus."
She heard Kitty call after her something about the penny stage, but by that time she was half-way across the road.
Bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned little beast!
She got on her bus.
But a quarter of a mile farther on she descended from it again. She wanted to buy chocolates for herself. She bought them, walked to the Marble Arch, and there turned into the Park. She ate the chocolates as she walked.
Little animal! He appeared to keep the whole School posted about Mr.
Jeffries" personal habits. He could not go down to his home for the week-end, taking the Polly Ross girl and her aunt with him apparently, but Mr. Jeffries and half-a-cake of soap must be dragged in. And that pathetic, pathetic care the man took of his hair and hands! For all that, as she strode along, crunching her chocolates, she became almost angry with him too. Was soap so frightfully dear, and was there no water anywhere but at Mr. Merridew"s rooms? She could not understand a man who had any sensitiveness at all suffering his mind to be turned over and inspected and thumb-marked by these people in this way.
Still, she must not forget that these things were diverting.
There was no cla.s.s that night: Louie forced herself to apply herself to her book-keeping until half-past nine, and then went to bed. That, as has been said, was on a Thursday. On the following evening, feeling indisposed to work, she moved about the School, amusing herself to her heart"s content. She was getting adept in the sport of it. She bandied back to Kitty Windus, with whom she found herself in talk, half-a-score of her own expressions: "Beg yours," "Granted," "As the poet says," and the like; and she all but openly stalked Mr. Mackie for the sake of the pearls that rippled from his lips. If Mr. Mackie had offered to take her for a walk or to a shilling hop at the Holborn Town Hall on the next blank evening, Lord Moone"s niece, who must allow no chance of amus.e.m.e.nt to slip her, would have let him. Indeed, she was in two minds whether or not to go to this last place of entertainment alone.
It was not for another week that her amus.e.m.e.nt at the School in general and at Mr. Jeffries in particular became almost painfully ecstatic.
III
On that Friday afternoon she did not go home as usual to Sutherland Place to tea. She went instead to the tea-shop across the street the waitresses of which seemed to crowd upon her as if the width of Holborn did not exist. As she sat down at her little marble table she glanced involuntarily across to the windows of the Business School and for a moment dropped the mask to herself. "Dingy place!" she thought; "well, we"re a dingy crew inside it." Then, after a long, long walk down Chancery Lane and along the Embankment almost as far as the ship-breakers" yard at Millbank, she returned to evening cla.s.s.
It was the evening before the day when Polly Ross--she begged her pardon, Miss Evie Soames--was to go with her aunt to the house with the tennis-lawn at Guildford. Young Merridew was not at the School that evening; indeed, he had only been once in the evening all the week, and then, Louie had thought (dropping the mask for another moment) he had better have stopped away. In a word, she had not been sure that he had been entirely sober. But perhaps in that she had been wrong. It didn"t matter. She set a wide difference between the gaieties of the sons of fancy stationers with a tidy bit coming in and such diversions as that to which her stepfather had once taken her, pigtail and all. Besides, if people didn"t drink liquor she supposed her father would not be able to sell it.
On two occasions already during the past week that mask of her amus.e.m.e.nt had not so much fallen off as been twitched off before she herself had been aware. Very remarkably, both times the big leonine student, Mr. Jeffries, had been the twitcher. In both cases the actual incident had been the same--a glance, nothing more. But those two glances had set Louie very curiously indeed waiting to see whether a third surprise of the same funny kind would follow them.
The glances had been given by Mr. Jeffries, and they had been directed towards the Soames girl. There had seemed to Louie to be an extraordinary unfitness about them. Had the red-waistcoated boy stolen those glances Louie would have thought no more about it; he and Polly Ross were pretty much a pair; but they had surprised her coming from the other. Louie had been sure that on the first occasion Mr. Jeffries had fancied himself to be un.o.bserved, for he had looked stealthily round about him, had waited for a moment, and then, moving his eyes only, had given that long, slow, daring, masterful look. This had been on the previous Monday evening, in the general room. A few minutes later Mr. Jeffries had gathered up his papers and had stridden past Evie Soames as if he had been unaware of her existence.
Even had something very similar not occurred again on the Wednesday evening, Louie would hardly have forgotten that look; but it had been repeated. But this time, finding Louie"s eyes on him, he had seemed to guard himself, to busy himself quite fussily with his papers, and a little to overdo his sudden affectation of indifference. Louie admitted that it would be at her own risk that she put any interpretation that was not amusing on these trifles; but about the glances, their surrept.i.tiousness and the man"s deliberate attempt at concealment, there had been no doubt whatever. Polly herself, Louie had to admit, had been quite unconscious of either look. To all appearances, she had been thinking of nothing but of the new novelette in the Pansy Library, or else wondering whether the new pair of shoes she was to go down to Guildford in would come home in time.
On that Friday evening Louie again found herself a little less inclined for amus.e.m.e.nt than she knew to be good for her. She supposed she ought to work, for if book-keeping and typewriting and so forth were to be her living they might just as well be taken seriously; but she preferred to work where gossip was going on. So she began the evening in one of the days in the =E= of reference books, where Miss Windus and the thick-lipped Miss Levey were sitting on the short library-ladder, whispering and t.i.ttering. Louie opened one of the windows, for she found the place airless, and then idled towards her two fellow-students.
She had gathered that Miss Levey did not like her. Miriam Levey was far less stupid than Kitty Windus, and it was not safe to hand her _cliches_ back to her. Indeed, she had given Louie a far too intelligent look when Louie had gratified this hunger for humour of hers at the unconscious Kitty"s expense; and Louie had told herself that it might be as well to be a little more careful. They looked up as Louie joined them, but did not exclude her from their talk.
"I _vill_ find out who she is!" Miss Levey was saying--her W"s did sometimes become V"s. "I shall plague him till I do!"
"He won"t tell you, my dear--not if he wouldn"t tell Archie."
"But did Archie actually say "engaged"?"
"Well, a person"s either engaged or not, I suppose."
"Oh no, my dear, not by long chalks! Vy, you might as well say that Archie and Evie are either engaged or not!"
"Well, they aren"t--yet."
""Yet"--there you are!"
"Well, I"ll bet they aren"t, even after this week-end. Why, they"re no age! _I_ don"t believe in getting yourself engaged and done for before you"ve had a good look round!" Kitty tossed her head.
"Vill you bet they aren"t engaged in three months?" said Miriam Levey.
No, Kitty wouldn"t bet that. She returned to the original subject, whatever that had been.
"It"s all very well to say you"ll find out, Miriam, but--how?"